


Be My Chauffeur

by tweedymcgee



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Dubious Morality, Dubious Science, M/M, Rivalry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 20:31:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1563080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tweedymcgee/pseuds/tweedymcgee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Master's built a brilliant paradox machine. The Doctor's one step ahead of him. And neither of them will remember this in the morning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Be My Chauffeur

**Author's Note:**

> Set between "Utopia" and "The Sound Of Drums." Written for the anon meme on best_enemies (prompt: "TaxiDriver!Nine picking up the Master -- any, but with especial preference for Simm -- and them ending up having sex in the taxi.").
> 
> I've almost certainly lifted a few ideas here from _Primer_ , which -- despite consisting almost entirely of incomprehensible technobabble between a couple of bland pocket-protector-wearing engineer types in a Dallas suburb -- is surely the most deeply terrifying film about time travel ever made. 
> 
> The title's bogarted from a Nina Simone song, but I think Tom Waits's "Strange Weather" goes nicely with this too, what with all the driving of taxis around in the rain and all. 
> 
> _And you know that it's beginning_   
> _And you know that it's the end_   
> _When once again we are strangers_   
> _And the fog comes rolling in_   
> _And all over the world, strangers_   
> _Talk only 'bout the weather_

It was three o'clock in the morning, Blackheath Avenue was empty and cold, and the rain was absolutely pissing down.

None of that put a dent in the Master's sunny disposition.

"The Lanesborough," he said when a cab pulled up at last, addressing the back of the cabbie's head. He sprawled extravagantly across the leather expanse of the back seat, shedding water in all directions. "And step on it. People say that, don't they? I like it. Step on it."

The cab driver gave a noncommittal grunt and obliged, sending the big hackney cab squealing away from the curb.

"Do you know," the Master said with a conspiratorial air, leaning forward and settling his chin on his folded arms, nose pressed against the sliding Plexiglas divider, "I have built something so brilliant, so monumentally, preposterously brilliant, that it would make every physicist at Oxford weep with shame."

"Have you now," said the driver, sailing through a red traffic light with blithe indifference.

"I did have a spot of trouble getting just the right amount of causal distortion through the temporal logic fork. It's a standard Blinovitch problem, but on a massive scale. I couldn't crack it for the longest time. Do you know what I finally did?"

"No, what?"

"Fed the signal through a probability amplifier, sped it up just a hair faster than the speed of light, and plugged it right back into the initial input sequence. Wouldn't you know it! Sorted!" He clapped his hands together with evident glee.

"Sounds complicated," said the driver.

The Master caught a hint of condescension in the rough Northern voice, and he didn't appreciate it. "It would literally fold your monkey brain right up like a pretzel just to look at it."

"Amazing," said the driver, in a deadpan voice clearly used for humoring maniacs at three in the morning.

" _Fucking_ amazing," said the Master and flopped back onto the seat with a tight little smile at the mental image he was entertaining: the driver being sliced to confetti by his own billion-times-great-grandchildren. Slowly. In eight-dimensional Technicolor.

The Master lay down across the back seat, settled down with his overcoat bunched behind his head for a pillow, and propped both feet up on the window. He rummaged in a pocket, pulled out a sleek little touchscreen device, and poked at it with a finger.

Fifteen minutes later, he sat up, annoyed. He'd been too engrossed in a cartoon to notice the driver's increasingly erratic route. "You're going completely the wrong way," he said.

"Yup," said the driver.

The Master could practically hear him grinning. "Do you have the slightest idea where you're going?" the Master seethed, gripping the seat back in front of him.

"Pretzels don't fold," said the driver.

"What?"

"They just sort of break apart into little bits. Unless you mean the big ones they sell from those little pushcarts. I suppose you could fold one. I've never tried. Have you?"

The cab was going much faster now, and beginning to exert alarming g-forces on its occupants when taking corners. The Master clutched a hand rail and glanced at the meter. It still read 0.00. "Stop this cab at once," he said.

"Oh, I will," said the driver, turning around to give the Master a toothy, slightly manic smile of reassurance. "Just as soon as we're there."

"As soon as we're where?" The Master was beginning to get a rather familiar queasy feeling.

"We've got reservations. And front-row seats." The cab hurtled down a narrow street between two long, low, industrial-looking buildings, and stopped short with a mighty complaining of tyres on wet pavement at the end of it, looking out over a long wharf. "There. Look right up there." He pointed up at the glowering sky.

The Master squinted. "I don't see anyth--"

_BOOM_. A massive telepathic field distortion, invisible to human eyes, momentarily lit up the clouds from behind like a searchlight through wet burlap, and sent a series of nasty little aftershocks reverberating throughout the Master's sensory system.

"Archangel V," said the Doctor. Because of course it was the Doctor, Rassilon only knew how.

The Master's mouth opened and shut like a fish's.

"Sorry about that," said the Doctor.

"No."

"I really am, though."

" _No_ ," said the Master, incredulous. "That's just...no."

"You've still got six other ones."

"But that one was -- it was -- it was _doing_ things."

"Exerting a mild hypnotic field across greater London, and preventing people from thinking of any interesting questions, like 'What's this police box doing parked in the middle of the Royal Observatory, and why is it wired up to a homemade particle accelerator?'" said the Doctor. "Whoops."

The Master uttered a few choice Gallifreyan epithets.

The Doctor kept talking. "Mass hypnotism is no way to solve a simple problem like keeping people from snooping around your TARDIS while you take it apart and turn it into a paradox machine. It's complete overkill."

"It was working just fine til you showed up," said the Master.

"Ooh, I've heard that one before," said the Doctor.

The Master's mouth twitched as he looked up at the sky, his stomach seized with a clammy dread. "Doctor," he said. "The paradox sequence is still priming. It's got another twelve hours to go, at least. You know what happens if anything disturbs it before it's fully propagated."

"That was really clever of you, using the probability amplifier," said the Doctor, ignoring him. "Much more elegant than what I ended up doing."

"Doctor, you're not listening. It's _still priming_."

"Sure I am," he said. "Twelve hours to go. That means, you turned it on, when, a couple of days ago?"

"Eleven-forty-seven P.M., Tuesday, precisely," said the Master. "What do you mean, what you ended up doing?"

“Applied Blinovitch problems are tricky. With this much juice, you're not careful, you'll end up generating a time lock and consigning the whole post-primer timeline to causal oblivion.”

“Exactly,” said the Master. “Which is why you don't interrupt the bloody signal while it's still priming.”

"Unless the time lock is the whole point,” said the Doctor.

The Master's expression didn't change, but his hands made involuntary fists, his nails sinking into his palms.

“In which case, you've got to find a way to get clear of the event horizon before starting the priming sequence,” said the Doctor. “Not much chance of that for us now, I'm afraid.”

“What,” said the Master, teeth gritted, a sickening clarity beginning to dawn. “A time lock. On purpose. That's just. _Doctor_.”

“You can even daisy-chain more than one together, if you have multiple TARDISes. Start a chain reaction,” the Doctor prattled, ignoring the edge in the Master's voice. "I've always wondered what it was like to be inside a collapsing bubble universe. Funny, it doesn't feel any different."

"It's not a bubble _yet_ ," the Master snapped.

"It will have been," said the Doctor.

"We can get to the TARDIS before anyone touches it. We can stop this. All we have to do is keep the signal stable until it's propagated."

"You know, there's a reason your mother told you never to mess with paradox machines. They're dangerous."

"I seem to recall her telling me not to mess with _you_ ," the Master said, icily.

"I wonder if I've done this before? It'd be just the sort of thing I'd do," said the Doctor. "It's not like you can leave yourself a note. 'Dear Doctor. Having a nice time in a bubble universe that's about to collapse in a causal crisis generated by an insufficiently primed paradox machine. Wish you were here. Love, The Doctor.'"

"Will. You. Stop. Blithering," said the Master, a note of panic creeping into his voice. "We've got to get to the TARDIS. Now. Before some wretched ape finds it."

"No," said the Doctor and turned to look directly at the Master through the divider. "We're not going to do that."

The Doctor's face on the other side of the scratched Plexiglas was cold and purposeful, and had a grim strength in it that the Master didn't quite recognize. He felt disoriented, looking into the Doctor's eyes, unsure if he was older or younger than the man he'd met at the end of the universe just a few months ago. Wondering how much he knew. And what he was capable of.

"It won't matter, you know," said the Master. "I've been planning this for months. All you're doing is resetting the causality stream to where it was a couple of days ago. You can't stop me like this."

"Who says I want to?" said the Doctor, with a loopy grin.

"You're mad," said the Master. "You're mad, and I'm going."

He reached for the latch, pulled it, and kicked the cab door open, ready to set off down the unfamiliar street. But the Doctor was quick, and came around to block his path.

The Master stood up. The Doctor's hands came up to grip his shoulders, rain running dark through his close-cropped hair and dripping solemnly from his nose.

"Don't you ever wonder?" said the Doctor.

"Wonder what?" the Master said.

"What you would do, if it didn't matter what you did," said the Doctor.

"It _doesn't_ , you idiot," the Master spat. And then he was falling, being propelled backward onto the leather seat of the cab, with the Doctor's inexorable weight on top of him, the Doctor's mouth on his. He pushed at the Doctor's chest with both hands, infuriated, and somehow pushing turned into pulling and pulling into a brief, frantic struggle for the upper hand in which the Master lost several shirt buttons.

"You utter maniac. You've gone and killed us both," the Master said, threading his fingers through the Doctor's wet hair, pressing into his temples hard enough to bruise, roughly seeking some purchase on the Doctor's mind.

"Sort of," said the Doctor, voice muffled against the Master's bare chest. "Kind of a dramatic way to put it, don't you think?" One hand was already fumbling at the Master's belt.

"And I'm letting you. _Ahhh_ ," The Master thrust his hips up to meet the Doctor's hand, hard and aching, the dread in his stomach giving way to the fierce thrill of sex in a new body. The Doctor was right; there was a sick excitement to it, wallowing in a pool of time slated to be rewound and overwritten.

The Master closed his eyes, feeling time weave around and through him, alert for any subtle shift in its texture and flow. He let it wash over him, merging with the heat of the Doctor's mouth on his skin, the pull and undertow of the other Time Lord's mind. "I can't feel it. Can you feel it?"

"No," said the Doctor. He stroked the Master's cock in a slow, deliberate rhythm, gripping just firmly enough so the Master could feel his own pulse beating hard and fast against the Doctor's hand. "Maybe a little."

Far above them, behind the leaden clouds over the Thames, a star winked out. And then another.


End file.
